Leinies hasn’t been on my list of beers to go out and get for awhile. The Red is good, the nutbrown is solid, but the Sunset wheat is far too sweet and I am not a fan of the honey/berry wiesse’s at all. We drink a few cases of their regular lager in cans while camping each summer and I have no complaints about that one for a sessionable beer, but Tuesday I had what is easily the best brew they have brewed to date (at least that you could drink and buy) and that’s their ‘Big Eddy’ line Russian Imperial Stout. I guess it’s going to be only around for a limited time, so grab it where you can. It’s an extremely well put together stout, with some real earthy richness at first blush that gets fruity and a little sour at the end. I was at a place where it was free and I drank a LOT of it, I had no desire to switch to anything else, and usually I’ll hit the ports/stouts and then switch to a weisse for the rest of the night. Great stuff.
Author: littlemute
Bestigor test model
Oh yeah– bad weather and back to painting is in full swing (albeit Skyrim and Saints Row 3). I did a paint test model for my bestigor unit and here it is. Mostly this post is to list out all the colors so I don’t forget what I used. I’m going to do 3 metal treatments and probably another skin treatment to mix up the look of the unit. I want especially to do the bestigor’s snouts black like the cover of the book, but didn’t do it on the test model. Note, I got ripped off by a guy on ebay selling bestigor bits and so his body is actually from the new Gor kit. Except for a couple places on the upper body, it looks totally fine– though the normal bestigor have armored (and sweet lovin’) thighs.
Horns: deneb stone washed with delvan mud and highlighted with deneb stone and skull white. This is from WD and worked out really well.
Skin: same as always: Dark Flesh, Vermin brown, Vermin brown + bronzed flesh (a discontinued color at this point)
Metal: Tin bitz, drybrush boltgun metal generously, drybrush silver a bit and wash with Vallejo Smoke with a lot of water – this gave a great weathering
Fur: not happy with it on this guy but here it is: beastial brown washed with delvan mud, highlighted with Snakebite leather and then snakebite + a bit of bronzed flesh.
Axe handle: scorched brown washed with black ink + delvan mud, highlighted a tiny bit with bleached bone
Leather: black as a base color, highlighted with snakebite leather and edge highlighted with deneb stone with a final wash of delvan mud. This is another WD recipe– on paper that should look like shit but it works out awesome on some parts.
Base: absolute key to every miniature looking good. If you’re going to be anal about something, the base is it. Bestial brown over black (important as black forms the lowest highlight, drybrushed heavily with snakebite leather, then again pretty heavy with bleached bone with a wee bit of static grass glued on here or there. Make sure to do the flat sides of the base in at least 2 coats of bestial brown to get a good finish.
All in all, I’m pretty happy with it– it’s not awesomely great, and while the Bestigor are the best heavy infantry in Warhammer 8th edition, he’s still just a rank and file. What you can’t see here is that his left arm is poorly attached to the axe hand and looks atrocious if you look up close on that side. However in a unit ranked up, this will be totally invisible.
epic stick figure drawings plus nonsense
The drawings are fine, but the comments on this reddit post are glorious:
Some bastard told on me. When my teacher said not to use that language, I asked her what language I was speaking. I only knew English.
Then I cried.”
Warhammer milestone (millstone?) 50 Gor!
Well the weather has turned to pure shite and so instead of going outside and getting fresh air and exercise, it’s the season for sitting in a dank basement doing stuff, and I have no more excuses for not working on the hairy beasts (well except for kids, work and Skyrim). Last night I completed my first unit for Warhammer Fantasy Battle ever by actually painting up my first unit base–and it was a big one– 50 gor with a hero, champion and standard bearer on 25mm bases. As you can see, I have a couple extra musicians in there so I have to paint up a few more rank and file to replace them, but it doesn’t change the fact that I can slap this giant unit of beastmen on the table complete with a painted and flocked unit base.
The base itself is from Gale Force 9 that I picked up this summer at Gencon. While solid in construction, it is slightly warped (nothing you can notice without looking really close, and I chalk that up to this being probably the biggest unit base they have, though Skaven players run slave units of 80-100 so this is not all that big of a unit). Hopefully having this weight of lead on it will flatten it out a bit because as you can see, this unit spans the history of GW’s beastmen with some of the mid 80’s models interspersed with the 5th edition “these guys look too small to have 2 wounds” to the excellent 6th edition kit. In the front rank is an old Minotaur from the 80’s. You can see how small he was compared to the new kit.
As much of a triumph as this is, it’s still just the beginning. Behind these lads is a unit of 30 bestigor (the big boys!) and I’ve got a spawn, a giant, 65 ungor, another Razorgor and a chariot to paint up in addition to building a herdstone to rape the Magic phase. As slow as I paint, it’s going to take years to get it all done…but at least I have this in the can!
Steve o Bot
Murder simulator for today: Saints Row 3
Baurice!Mastard and I got in on some co-op Saints Row 3 last night with ridiculous results. I laughed so hard from the basement region that I woke the kids and the wife was afraid I would stumble into the bedroom at midnight babbling about how great shooting people out of a cannon attached to a car was. After playing a bit of 2, I’m shocked at the overall quality of 3– great graphics, good sound, a much better driving/crashing/damage engine and it turns the entire gameworld into one big pro wrestling match with the fighting system. Forget the guns, the DDT’s and clotheslines are where it’s at! If you like the genre (which I’m hot and cold on in general), this is a must buy as it is completely over the top insanity. This is just a tiny taste of the mayhem of co-op.
and
FF’s Nexus Ops preview posted
If you already have the Avalon Hill version of the game, like the glow in the dark figures and don’t think the gameplay needs to change at all, other than hoping for a steep drop in price for the old version to pick up a copy, what would entice you to buy the new version? New variants and components to support those variants is a likely answer. In FF’s preview post, they detail the Vortex variant that moves around the map (a bit like the storm in Dune) and can pick up units and place them around the board, incinerate some and give energize cards to players who have stuff nearby where it lands that survive. Not a bad little random chaos thrown in– the key is if you can score VP’s somehow by using the vortex to your advantage.
Something is odd though– take a look at how the home mining areas are placed on the board with one hex hanging off– this is quite different from the old version that has them flipped the other way in a 4-player game.
FATE! first session
I got a chance to run a FATE-based game last night using the Dresden Files rules. Instead of going through the usual world-building session that would lead to an extensive campaign, we played a published one-off adventure so people could get the feel of the system. I chose “Night Fears” as it seemed the simplest both in the low power level of the characters and the fairly simple scenario of kids showing up to a purportedly haunted house to spend the night. Of course since there are Fae born characters and a ghost talking kid, the house IS haunted. My goals were to help the players to learn what the Fudge dice were for, how to use skills (the easy parts), and how to use fatepoints to invoke, tag, and asses Aspects. Also, since FATE has a pretty unique damage system, I wanted them to understand what Stress and consequences were. I’m a newb myself, so these were also things that I understood in the abstract, but didn’t know how they actually played out.
The characters, pregenerated high school students included a Faeborn trickster, a religious kid whose faith actually gives him some supernatural power, a kid who can see the past (a bit) by focusing in on an inanimate object and a normal girl who is just real sensitive to her surroundings. Nothing too powerful at all so there wasn’t going to be any running around with axes or gunplay. What’s cool about this scenario is that these characters start off incomplete without all their skills and aspects chosen and this really gave the players a chance to start to understand what aspects are and how they are derived. Night Fears has a section devoted to a series of questions to ask the group where the players themselves have a large hand in defining why exactly they are at the house and what they’re each doing there that night. After a half hour or so, turning the answers to these questions in to aspects became a breeze, and a lot of fun too. What the aspects actually DO was still a mystery at this point.
Because it was kids in a haunted house, I’d say 80% of the game play we got through was player on player interaction. Since they were trying to scare each other out of the house, they started doing attacks (social or mental) on each other via ghost stories or trying to freak the others out with tricks. This ended up causing consequences almost all around the table. Of course, the house itself slowly starts to do these things to the kids as well (of course!). Most of the characters took consequence aspects like ‘freaked out’ or ‘creeped out’ but one player took “huddled inside my sleeping bag” which forced him to walk around with his sleeping bag around him from that point on.
We didn’t get all that far, obviously the shit starts to go down the nearer it gets to midnight and I felt as a GM I wasn’t doing all that much (my NPC’s were not ‘active’ much during the session, but people had quite a bit of fun I think.
My main questions are: When does some sort of argument become an attack– there was a fight over a flashlight (verbal) and in Exalted, you can actually ‘win’ the fight via social combat and get the flashlight, but in FATE, it seemed like the players would be just laying on consequences/stress that didn’t specifically resolve the argument over the flashlight. Plus if you have social stress from the fight about the flashlight– should this carry over to a fight say– about going upstairs alone?
Environmental Aspects– these are aspects on the scene itself that can be invoked or tagged– but as a GM, if I invoke a scene aspect, who gets the Fate point? Who pays it? I’m still not totally clear on those bits.
All in all, a good time and not the usual Exalted 4-6 hour combat mega-bloodbaths I’m used to running (which are also good!).
SKYRIMMED!
It’s finally out! Only a few hours in and it’s showing it’s quality in the combat, systems and graphics. The metacritic score speaks for itself at ninety SIX. While I liked Oblivion a lot, especially the Shivering Isles expansion (that just had excellent writing throughout) I felt Morrowind was the stronger game– though certainly not technically nor graphically– heck modders were able to make far better PC/NPC heads than Bethesda did back then, and by far better I really mean it, so my hope with Skyrim is that it tops Morrowind by far.
Here is a tweak guide for PC users: http://www.shacknews.com/chatty?id=27073178#item_27073178. Big thing is to increase the Field of View if you are running in the FPS view (which is good for finding the small stuff).
My main love so far is that you can SWIM IN THE FUCKING CREEKS! And I don’t mean just on the surface! Like Morrowind, you can go under the water and look around and, of course, find stuff. Otherwise, like Fallout, for as big as the Skyrim world is, there is a shocking amount of detail to the environments– not RAGE level, which is wonderment incarnate, but close.
You still can’t make a pretty girlface via the custom creator. In that this is no different than oblivion or fallout. All the girls you can make for each race are fug ugs.
Hey! Penn State Students!
Does winning football games give people the right to place their penis inside a child’s butthole? Your riot says YES! Your football program should be dissolved. Your school should be closed, then demolished. You are a school of paederasts.